3 Tips to Get to Know Your Doctor
Here is a USA Weekend piece on the type of advice I give in Critical Decisions – how to make stronger connections with your doctor.
My colleagues and I have been doing lots of research lately on how physicians and patients discuss out-of-pocket expenses during clinic encounters. One of our recent publications has been getting lots of attention, with this being the latest example. I thought I would share it with you: Recent qualitative findings published in Health Affairs showed that physicians…
This summer I had the pleasure of speaking with a very intelligent journalist, who was working on an article about overtreatment in medical care. That article has just come out, and I thought I would give you a sample of it here: A few months ago, I went to my gynecologist looking for help with a…
KARAN: You referred to patient education earlier, not just in terms of treatment information but also the types of questions to be asking. But what about the former? Our generation is definitely comfortable using technology to look up health information, and we get a ton of information through news, magazines, and the general media. But…
Put simply, shared decision making is the gold standard — the sine qua non* — for how medical decisions ought to be made. The pipe medical choice is rarely a function of medical facts alone. Tough decisions require value judgments, and it is the patient’s valuesthat often determine which choice is best. An operation cannot…
In response to the New England Journal article I published with Yousuf Zafar and Amy Abernethy, Newsweek chimed in this week with a report on the topic, including some thoughtful commentary from other medical experts. I thought it was worth pointing you towards this article, in part to remind you that Newsweek still exists, and…
Patients often rely on physicians for information about their treatment alternatives. Unfortunately, that information is not always objective. Consider a man with early stage prostate cancer interested in surgical removal of his tumor, but uncertain whether it is better for the surgery to be performed with the help of robotic technology. He asks his surgeon…